Four Outside-the-Box Examples of Content Marketing We Love

Content marketing is an instrumental part of our strategy at Marketeering Group. This approach to marketing reaches customers by creating and distributing engaging, relevant, and consistent digital content. By focusing on content, brands can more easily raise awareness with their audiences by sharing messages customers are interested in seeing, rather than obtrusive and out-of-place advertisements.

From blog posts to photos, videos, social media, and more, options abound to create this type of engaging digital content and share it with the world. Here are a few interesting content marketing examples we think go above and beyond the rest.

New York Times and Samsung’s Daily 360 Videos

In a world that’s ever more digital, historically-print media outlets have had to dream up creative ways to stay relevant. The New York Times has been on the forefront of what it means to be a journalist in the 21st century, and has started to redefine the way news stories are told.

In a collaboration with Samsung, the global news media company brought stories to the world in a completely original way: a 360-degree virtual reality experience. Through this collaboration, the New York Times has been able to create a new frontier of storytelling, and Samsung’s latest and greatest technology is showcased to hundreds of thousands of readers around the world through the NYT.

[Related: Why Quality Is Better Than Quantity With Content Marketing]

Subaru’s MeetAnOwner.com and Beautiful Anonymous Podcast

Subaru has recently taken a novel approach to reaching millennial customers in the digital space.

Their Meet An Owner project shares Subaru drivers’ experiences with their cars. This website includes tales of artists on the road, mountaineers in action, and a whole lot more.

Another creative content strategy Subaru recently used was the popular Beautiful Stories From Anonymous People podcast. This podcast — where anonymous people call in and talk to host Chris Gethard about anything for an hour — attracts a large audience of millennials. Rather than buying general ad space on this podcast, Subaru went a step further and created branded content within the podcast.

The car manufacturer sponsored mini episodes of the show to be aired in the same format as the podcast: Anonymous people would call in and talk to the host about anything in the world; the only requirement was that the person call from a Subaru.

[Related: Why Blogging Is Essential to Your Business]

Taco Bell’s Blog

Whether you’re a Taco Bell fiend or you prefer to avoid the late-night fast food taco joint, you can’t deny that their marketing has style. They know their target audience, namely young people in search of cheap food, and they know what type of content attracts their attention.

(For another Taco Bell marketing strategy we think is great, check out “Taco Mode,” their promotion strategy with Lyft.)

Taco Bell’s blog is a digital platform that shares a variety of integrated digital content. This multiplatform channel offers everything from catchy headlines such as “This Happened: We Got Married in a Taco Bell” to stories about taco options for under 400 calories (“because you want that summer bod and that taco”). These catchy, fun-to-read, and digitally integrated stories engage Taco Bell’s target audience and keep them coming back for more.

[Related: Content Marketing Tips]

Always’ #LikeAGirl Campaign

Always, Proctor, and Gamble’s line of feminine products recently created an award-winning campaign. This content did not directly advertise their products, but instead was created with the goal of building confidence in young girls. Always’ studies found a decline in confidence among girls around the time of puberty, and the brand wanted to shift that paradigm. The solution was to build a campaign to change the meaning of what it means to do something “like a girl.”

This campaign is prevalent across digital channels, with their preliminary video gaining more than 85 million views in over 150 countries. These videos also ran hand-in-hand with a campaign to broaden the representation of women in iPhone emojis, pointing out that most of the sports and professional emojis did not feature women (“unless you consider being a bride a profession,” said one girl featured in their content).

In their follow-up study, brand representatives found that under 20% of 16 to 24 year olds had a positive association with the saying “like a girl” before interacting with this campaign. After seeing this content, 76% of the group said they no longer saw the phrase negatively.

[Related: The Three Most Popular Structures for Blog Posts]

Why These Campaigns Work

No single foolproof formula for successful content marketing exists, but these creative integrations of digital storytelling and branding have a few things in common:

• Seamless multi-platform integration: None of the campaigns above are made in a single medium. They each have some combination of written content, audio, images, or video to tell a cohesive story. This type of integration enables stories to reach people through YouTube, newsletters, and a number of other platforms. Tying content together across platforms also increases the potential of these campaigns to go viral through social media promotion.

• Targeted messaging: Tween girls love emojis. And what better way to get late-night-drunken-party-goers into Taco Bell than doing a promotion with a rideshare service? Having great messages is key to content marketing, but you can have the best creative collateral in the world and it won’t matter if the right people don’t see it. Ensuring your marketing messages reach your target audience in channels they frequently use is a common thread between these campaigns.

• Cohesive stories, not obtrusive advertisements: Most people click out of pop-up ads and wait for commercials to come on to take a bathroom break. Successful content marketing does the opposite: It grabs your attention. From experiencing zero gravity through Samsung’s 360 cameras to reshaping what it means to do something “like a girl,” content marketing goes beyond annoying advertisements and shares cohesive and engaging stories.

Let’s chat about ideas for your next creative campaign!

At Marketeering Group, one of our specialties is creating engaging and effective digital content. Schedule a free consultation with a Marketeering Group strategist to discuss how content marketing can help you achieve your business goals.

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